Giving Compass' Take:

• An educator shares the importance of community for vulnerable students as COVID-19 forces alternative high schools that support students with addiction to close. 

• How can education donors not only help school districts but offer assistance and support to vulnerable students in particular?

• Learn how funders can promote equity during COVID-19. 

I teach at Seattle’s largest alternative high school, which has been shuttered since March 11. Like all the campuses serving the city’s roughly 53,000 public school students, it is expected to remain closed for another six weeks amid the new coronavirus outbreak.

But our school, Interagency Academy, is not like most other schools. It serves some of the highest risk teens in Seattle — those who have been “permanently expelled” from comprehensive schools, who are homeless, who are incarcerated or who have just fallen through the cracks. I teach in one of the nation’s few “sober high school” programs, serving about 25 kids in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Each Interagency campus has a math and English teacher on-site. I run the computer lab where students take their science, history, and elective courses all virtually.

Connection, it has been said, is the opposite of addiction — and connection is what we have long provided to our students.

For teenagers who have struggled with substance abuse, being part of a tight-knit community like ours can help them stay clean. So we worry about the effects of the healthcare edict that is “social distancing.” And while such isolation is already embedded in Seattle’s culture — locals call it The Freeze — the teenagers that we serve, young people at risk of self-medicating, need each other and they need us.

That’s why we have divided up our program’s roster so that each teacher can stay in touch with certain students. Just what every teenager wants when school is closed, right? Teachers calling, video-chatting, and texting. But that’s what we are doing, and we are finding ways to connect them to each other, too.

Read the full article about why students need community by Phyllis Coletta at Chalkbeat.